This volume covers a tumultuous period in Yeats's public and personal life, beginning with the acrimonious collapse of Maud Gonne's marriage to Major MacBride (who not only accused Yeats of being her lover but also threatened to shoot him). Dramas at the Abbey Theatre were hardly less intense, both on and off the stage: the euphoria which followed the successful opening of the new theatre quickly dispersed in a relentless cycle of quarrels and schisms. Yeats's attempts to turn an enthusiastic but ill-disciplined amateur society into a professional company led to a permanent division in the company, while the vagaries of Annie Horniman, the irascible patron of the theatre, put the whole movement under permanent tension. Violence actually broke out in January 1907 when the audience rioted at the production of John Synge's The Playboy of the Western World, believing it to be a libel on Ireland. Through all this we see Yeats maturing as an artist: discussing the writing and revising of his poems and plays, preparing the first elaborate American edition of his poems, and undertaking an ambitious eight-volume Collected Works through which he hoped to define his artistic personality. The letters not only record this energetic and often bruising period, but also bear witness to Yeats's indomitable fighting spirit and artistic integrity.

This volume covers a tumultuous period in Yeats's public and personal life, beginning with the acrimonious collapse of Maud Gonne's marriage to Major MacBride (who not only accused Yeats of being her lover but also threatened to shoot him), and encompassing the fiery disputes in the Abbey Theatre as it changed from an amateur society into a professional company. Through all this, we see Yeats maturing as an artist: writing and revising poems and plays, and preparing an eight-volume Collected Works through which he hoped to define his artistic personality. The letters not only record an energetic and bruising period, but also bear witness to Yeats's indomitable fighting spirit and artistic integrity.

This fourth volume of The Collected Letters shows Yeats in the full throes of professional life and focuses particularly on his engagement with the Irish drama movement. The editors John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard have provided a superb narrative introduction to a volume that includes letters both to and from Yeats and an appendix documenting the tumultuous history of the Abbey Theatre that is a valuable study in itself. Kelly and Schuchards detailed annotations are thorough but never pedantic, the letters themselves are unusually fascinating, and the whole provides a sense of both sweep and detail. An exemplary marriage of literary pleasure and scholarly brilliance, The Collected Letters will be a work of abiding interest to both general readers and specialists.